[TUHS] long lived programs

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 6 Apr 2018, Warner Losh wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 5, 2018, 8:04 PM Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Apr 5, 2018, at 17:38, Bakul Shah wrote:
>>> May be case itself is such a historical artifact?  AFAIK all non-roman
>>> scripts are without case distinction.
>>
>> Greek and Cyrillic both have cases. And the Hiragana/Katakana distinction
>> in Japanese is similar to case in some ways (including limited computer
>> systems using only one)
>>
>
> Really? Those must be quite old as everything I've seen has both. But the
> difference between kata and kana is much larger than upper and lower case.
> It is rare to convert one to another as they are used to write different
> things. Only to look things up in a dictionary would you convert, and then
> you'd also be converting kanji to...
>
> In Roman languages, very little is changed with all caps, though a few
> things become ambiguous depending on the language...
>
> In Japanese, it could turn some foreign loan word into a native word with a
> totally different meaning...
>
> Warner

Some computers in the early 80s, like the Apple ][ J-Plus, only do 
katakana.

-uso.